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Sun, 02 Aug 2015 20:30:25 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Talking DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES with Andy Serkis, Toby Kebbell and Director Matt Reeveshttp://nerdist.com/talking-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-with-andy-serkis-toby-kebbell-and-director-matt-reeves/
http://nerdist.com/talking-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-with-andy-serkis-toby-kebbell-and-director-matt-reeves/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 20:00:51 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?post_type=vepisode&p=206222It’s safe to say that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of the biggest surprises of the 2011 summer movie season. In addition to a compelling story and great performances, the Weta motion capture technology was a sight to be seen, and Andy Serkis’ brilliant performance of Caesar changed the game in the new technological style of acting.

This summer fans were treated to the follow up, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, helmed by Cloverfield and Let Me In director Matt Reeves. The global blockbuster smash was met with stellar reviews, and I got the chance to sit down with Reeves, Serkis and actor Toby Kebbell to talk about making the film, telling the powerful story and what we can look forward to from the next installment.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, starring Andy Serkis, Toby Kebbell, Jason Clarke, Keri Russell and Gary Oldman, is now available on digital and Blu-ray.

]]>http://nerdist.com/talking-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-with-andy-serkis-toby-kebbell-and-director-matt-reeves/feed/0TV-Cap: SILK ROAD Gets a TV Take, Shartlo Copley has POWERS, and Gloria Steinem on THE GOOD WIFEhttp://nerdist.com/tv-cap-silk-road-gets-a-tv-take-shartlo-copley-has-powers-and-gloria-steinem-on-the-good-wife/
http://nerdist.com/tv-cap-silk-road-gets-a-tv-take-shartlo-copley-has-powers-and-gloria-steinem-on-the-good-wife/#commentsThu, 18 Sep 2014 14:30:05 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=183859Hello hello, television lovers. Are you having a swell Thursday morning? You should be, because there’s many a good thing happening on there in the small screen world. In fact, our cup just keeps runnin’ itself over. So we’ve decided to change things up and bring you the TV-Cap early in the morning because what better way to start your day than with an arsenal of news ripe and ready for the discussin’, eh?

The Silk Road Less Traveled: Gary Oldman is producing a show on Spike TV about the Internet’s black market for drugs and other crazy, should-not-be-sold-ever-probably stuff. Titled Deep Web, the series will focus on the tech nerds who decided becoming crime bosses was fay more glamorous (hey, this was the pre-Silicon Valley era we’re talking about, you guys) and profitable by shilling internal organs, drugs, and rocket launchers. Hoo boy. The anti-hero (??) nerds are coming. [Daily Dot]

OK, Fine, We’ll Watch Your New Show, Franco: Goddamnit James Franco, your new AOL Originals series, Making a Scene with James Franco looks really fun thanks to the new images from it over at EW. Also there are cats so you know the Internet will be on board: [Entertainment Weekly]

Gloria, Gloria Hallelujah: Gloria Steinem will be playing herself on The Good Wife and I am VERY EXCITE! Also The Good Wife is seriously terrific, you guys, get on that. [TVLine]

NBC Has a Problem [Child] on Its Hands: Nostalgia: it’s a hell of a drug. That’s why, we’re assuming, NBC has decided to pick up the idea of a Problem Child TV reboot (y’know, that 90s movie about a kid named Junior starring John Ritter). So that’s a thing! [UPROXX]

Welcome to Dramaville: The creepy kid from Dancing on the Edge (Tom Hughes) has a new show on BBC America, you guys. Titled The Game, the six-part miniseries is “a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride” about spies fighting a secret war called Operation Glass. It was created by Toby Whithouse, who has written several episodes of Being Human and Doctor Who. It’s MI5 stuff on TV! And now it has a trailer:

The History of LA Crime Comes to ABC: Well, OK, we’re not the biggest procedural fans in the world, but when it’s done well it can be pretty great (see: season one of NBC’s Hannibal). So we’ve got high hopes for ABC’s latest venture in the genre, The L.A. Crime, which follows that crime-an-episode formula but also has a bit of a miniseries vibe to it, as each season will track a different bad-doing throughout the city of Los Angeles’ history. Season one, for example, will track the “sex, politics and popular culture” surrounding a Bonnie & Clyde-esque serial killer team taking people out in the 80s. It’s backdrop? The Sunset Strip, of course, because what’s more pop culture than that? Maybe work on the name a bit though. [Deadline]

Sharlto Copley’s Got Powers, Y’all: Playstation’s content game is going the big-concept procedural route with Powers, an adaptation of the Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming comic of the same name. Starring District 9‘s Shartlo Copley and Susan Heyward (The Following, Michael & Michael Have Issues.), the cop drama will focus on “a real world where you actually have to deal with powers and how they impact society.” Is EVERYTHING in TV and movies SUPER now? [HitFix]

Throwback Thursday, Friends Edition: As if the appearance of a Central Perk pop-up cafe in New York City weren’t enough to satiate all you Friends obsessives out there, the celebratory shenanigans (hey, it was the 20th anniversary very recently and, oh yeah, we’re all very old) took a turn for the musical with The Rembrandts performing the show’s theme song because that’s all their career must be anymore, right? [Entertainment Weekly]

We’ll be there for you, but will you be there for us like we’re there for you, too? Let us know in the comments.

]]>http://nerdist.com/tv-cap-silk-road-gets-a-tv-take-shartlo-copley-has-powers-and-gloria-steinem-on-the-good-wife/feed/0Gary Oldman Looks Ready to Leap Into More Sci-fi With CRIMINALhttp://nerdist.com/gary-oldman-looks-ready-to-leap-into-more-sci-fi-with-criminal/
http://nerdist.com/gary-oldman-looks-ready-to-leap-into-more-sci-fi-with-criminal/#commentsMon, 14 Jul 2014 20:30:42 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=166859Gary Oldman isn’t done with sci-fi, it seems: the actor is in negotiations to join the thriller Criminal as a CIA chief. If the deal goes through, that would make a trifecta of science fiction roles for the actor including this weekend’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes for Fox and the Robocop remake for MGM.

So what’s the deal with Criminal? According to The Hollywood Reporter, who broke the news about the casting deal, the film follows a prison inmate who is implanted with the memories of a KIA CIA agent in order to thwart some kind of plot. Kevin Costner has already signed on for a role in the film, and the film’s IMDB page is claiming that Hulk star Eric Bana has been cast as someone called “Heimdahl,” although you should always take IMDB casting with a grain of salt until the studio makes an official confirmation.

The Iceman writer-director Ariel Vromen is set to direct Criminal from a script by David Weisberg. The material doesn’t seem like too much of a leap for Vromen, whose script for The Iceman put viewers in the mind of another dangerous man, real-life hitman Richard Kuklinski who was locked up in the mid-80’s for a string of mob hits.

This Criminal shouldn’t be confused with Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, which is also headed to the big screen. The first arc of the critically-acclaimed crooks and also crooks creator-owned comic, “Coward,” is in development with The Good, The Bad, and the Weird director Kim Jee-Woon (replacing previously-announced director David Slade).

What do you think of Gary Oldman’s foray into sci-fi? Let us know in the comments below.

]]>http://nerdist.com/gary-oldman-looks-ready-to-leap-into-more-sci-fi-with-criminal/feed/0Great Apes!: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)http://nerdist.com/great-apes-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-2014/
http://nerdist.com/great-apes-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-2014/#commentsFri, 11 Jul 2014 22:30:45 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=165848In the eighth and final (for now) installment of Great Apes!, we look at the most recent film in the Planet of the Apes franchise, and find a pretty ripping wartime polemic, although one strangely devoid of levity.

I mentioned in the very first Great Apes! article that one of the central appealing factors of the 1968 original was its mixture of apocalyptic commentary and subtle absurdist humor. When the Apes franchise started a new continuity in 2011 – now being directly continued in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – I noted that the tone was much more stern than its predecessors. I wasn’t necessarily disturbed by the lack of levity, but I did note it as an interesting choice. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes takes the stern tone of Rise of the Planet of the Apes and expands it. The violence is more extensive, the tension much higher, and the conflicts much more dramatic. At 130 minutes, it’s also the longest film in the entire Apes series, turning it from a simple sci-fi yarn into a summertime Hollywood action epic. It’s also a pretty darn good movie.

I have to address the special effects right away. The previous film used the latest in CGI motion capture technology to make digital avatars of intelligent apes, avatars that were stirringly convincing. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is perhaps the first film I have seen to use extensive digital effects that, well, actually look real. I knew intellectually that I was looking at digital effects, but the technology has finally advanced to such a degree that I was wholly convinced of the reality of the digital imagery. Without hyperbole, I can say that this film has some of the best special effects I’ve ever seen. It perhaps helps that the digital apes and the live-action human actors do not touch one another, highlighting their on-camera differences. But looking at these apes, one can be almost 100% convinced that they are actual chimpanzees grunting English words at one another.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is essentially a mulligan for Battle for the Planet of the Apes. I think we can say that now all is forgiven. Indeed, I might even allow this film to act as penance for the much-hated 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau, a enjoyably crazy but often maligned man vs. animal movie. Dawn takes place about a decade after Rise, in a near future wherein a few virus-resistant humans – the only ones left alive on a ruined Earth – live in protected cities with barely enough power to survive. The apes, including Caesar (motion capture by Andy Serkis) have formed their own rudimentary villages, complete with structures, schools, and a language that consists partly of sign language and partly of raspy English. They even have a primary law: Ape shall not kill ape, a law taken from Battle.

The story is a polemic about nonviolence vs. those who are interested in war. Caesar wants to live in peace, but is constantly butting heads with his ape lieutenant Koba (motion capture by rising star Toby Kebbell) who wants to kill all humans. Koba is clearly modeled after General Aldo from Battle. The humans, meanwhile are having a similar conflict. Peaceful engineer Malcolm (Jason Clarke) wants to trek into ape territory to fix a dam in order to power the nearby human village, whilst his violent lieutenant Carver (Kirk Acevedo) wants to kill all apes. The human characters all have direct ape analogues in the film. While the central battle will be between apes and humans, the thematic conflict will be between warmongers and peaceniks within their respective species. The themes don’t penetrate nearly as deeply as some of the previous ape movies, and they’re hardly subtle (Conquest and the original Planet were both richer and had more finesse about it), but I was relieved to see that they were present.

There is a primal, hilarious thrill to seeing an ape on horseback, firing two machine guns into the air, screaming in monkey rage, which is something that happens in the film’s climax. The film is shooting for a somber and serious tone, but at least throws me – admittedly a guy with a weird sense of humor – a few bones of fun weirdness. Or maybe I am personally too entertained by such imagery; I giggled a lot while watching the movie. Either way, it’s a good time. Dawn runs a bit too long, and some of the final act plot details seems tacked on; the final battle is actually only a penultimate battle. But overall, this is a gorgeous, fun, very entertaining movie. It’s not the best in the series (I am, for better or worse, ever a classicist who often prefers originals to remakes), but I would rank it higher than Rise. It’s a slick, fun, impeccably made action spectacular.

Where does the Apes series go from here? Dawn ends on an ambiguous note, implying that there will be future violence between ape and man. Perhaps the next film will deal more directly with the fall of humans. Is this new Ape continuity going to lead us to something like in the 1968 original, wherein apes are upright, well-dressed intellectuals, and humans are mute animals in cages? I hope so. But we’ll have to start skipping whole millennia for that, and I’m not entirely sure the filmmakers are yet ready to start this particular continuity with all new characters just yet.

If they continue to be successful, we’ll eventually find out. Thanks for reading Great Apes!, dear readers. This is your Lawgiver signing off.

]]>http://nerdist.com/great-apes-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-2014/feed/8Review: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APEShttp://nerdist.com/review-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/
http://nerdist.com/review-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/#commentsFri, 11 Jul 2014 15:30:25 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=165707Sometimes franchise movies don’t feel like franchise movies and that’s a good thing. Even though Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is technically the eighth film to bear the …Planet of the Apes name, it’s almost a completely new and different take on the entire idea of a world with hyper-intelligent apes. While certainly a sequel in character and circumstance to 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it tackles ideas and themes that were hinted at in earlier movies but never explicitly shown. If Rise was a retooling of the ideas present in 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, then I suppose Dawn would fall into the camp of being 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, except of course that Battle was by far the worst film of the original five, and Dawn is in every way a step up from the already-impressive Rise.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes doesn’t spend a lot of time holding your hand getting you up to speed as far as where we are and who everybody is when we start. Either you saw Rise or you didn’t, and largely it doesn’t matter too much as long as you’re aware that apes are intelligent and humans have been wiped out by a man-made virus. From there, like all good sci-fi allegories, we can focus on the well-trod idea that there are two opposing factions on this overgrown and gutted world and they can either find a way to co-exist, or they can destroy each other. What I love the very most about the movie, before getting into specifics, is the way it portrays each side as being destructive through fear and not through being evil. Humans aren’t the enemy and apes aren’t the enemy; it’s individuals from both sides that are to blame for the violence that escalates. And, boy howdy, does it ever escalate.

We begin deep in the San Francisco Park forest with hundreds of apes all living in relative peace under the watchful eye of Caesar (Andy Serkis), the hero of the last film. It’s been long enough since that film for Caesar to have a son the relative age of a teenager. His mate, Cornelia (the sadly underused Judy Greer), is giving birth to their second son, and all seems right with the Planet they’ve created. However, the humans who live just over the bridge are coming in to the forest. While out with friends, Caesar’s son Blue Eyes is met by a human named Carver (Kirk Acevedo) who is scared enough to pull a gun and shoot the friend, Ash. Other humans hurry to his aid, led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke), his “mate” (Keri Russell), and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The apes too arrive on the scene and chase the humans away with a mighty bellow of “GO!” which startles the humans greatly.

Caesar has an ultimatum for the humans later – the apes will stay in their home if the humans remain in theirs. Unfortunately, the humans, led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), need to go into the forest to get a hydroelectric dam working to get light back to the city. They’re almost out. While Dreyfus thinks a war is the only answer, Malcolm believes he can convince Caesar to let them get the plant operational again and leave. Caesar’s inherent trust of humans is at direct odds with the feelings of his second in command, Koba (Toby Kebbell), who was one of the apes badly mistreated by scientists in the last film. Either an uneasy truce will be forged or the bubbling idea of war will overflow. From the fact that this is also an action movie, you can pretty much guess which ideal wins out.

Director Matt Reeves instills a lot of tension into the film which is exactly what is needed for the post-apocalyptic Cold War on display. You feel at any moment the war could break out and then when it does it feels like any moment could spell disaster for both sides. It’s a hard thing to achieve for a movie with talking apes in it. It feels very much like a grown-up, proper sci-fi movie, not unlike the original Planet of the Apes in 1968. There’s terrific spectacle and apes will always be enjoyable to see, but there’s some very troubling and real-world implications to the story at play.

There are moments of truly impressive visual filmmaking. One moment in particular involves a tank being driven through San Francisco after the apes’ attack begins. The camera is affixed just behind the gunner and as the action unfolds and apes come to take the tank, the camera continues uninterrupted like we’re watching some kind of war footage recorded for the Discovery Channel. It’s an absolutely stunning shot. Other sequences worth mentioning are the opening elk hunt, the march on the human city, and the fight on the tower at the end. It will all make sense when you see it, but Reeves’s direction is absolutely breathtaking.

Once again, as in Rise, the apes are where the movie’s heart lies, and most of that is due to unfathomably brilliant central performance by Andy Serkis as Caesar. Though I’m certainly not the first person to say this, Serkis deserves multiple Oscars for the work he’s done conveying so much depth, pathos, and compassion into a digitally-realized character. He’s joined by Toby Kebbell who gives an equally impressive and rather terrifying performance as Koba, the angry would-be usurper to Caesar’s throne.

What I think is really brilliant about these apes is that only a few of them have the capacity to speak verbally, but they all understand English and can all communicate via sign language, which is the bulk of the dialogue in the film. They aren’t just chatting willynilly, nor when they are speaking aloud does it seem particularly easy for them. They aren’t Roddy McDowell or Kim Hunter speaking perfect accented Englishl; the apes still only have the noise-producing faculties present in non-enhanced simians and so they truly do speak through the grunts and howls they were born with.

If there’s one downside to the movie it’s, as in Rise, the human characters. While they’re certainly more interesting and less caricatured than they were in the earlier film, there’s still not a whole lot there for people to attach themselves to. Malcolm’s family is meant to parallel Caesar’s and bring the two fathers closer together, which it does, but there’s not much else for those family members to do. Oldman is wonderful as always, but even he gets overlooked to a large degree by the end when he becomes fanatical to a degree that seems out of character. Still, the movie is about the Apes and if the humans don’t get in the way of that, then it’s not really a bad thing. Just a bit more development might have been nice.

Overall, though, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is another worthy entry into one of my favorite film series of all time, and another tick in the box of my belief that this is the Summer of Science Fiction. It didn’t set my brain alight, but it is totally engaging, terrifically exciting, and thoroughly satisfying.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Burritos

]]>http://nerdist.com/review-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/feed/4Interview: Director Matt Reeves Talks DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APEShttp://nerdist.com/interview-director-matt-reeves-talks-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/
http://nerdist.com/interview-director-matt-reeves-talks-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 22:30:08 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=165994Between films like Snowpiercer and Edge of Tomorrow, this summer has been a great time for fans of intelligent, slickly produced, incredibly entertaining sci-fi, and starting at midnight tonight we’ll be adding another name to that list: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The sequel to 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, while marketed as a high octane action movie, is one of the most emotionally gripping, heartfelt, and thoughtful summer blockbusters I’ve seen in a long time. That isn’t to say it’s without its fair share of action; it has a scene in which an ape fires two machine guns into the air while riding a horse through a fiery hellscape, for crying out loud. Rather, it manages to hit both the elements we need for a big, summer popcorn flick and have something genuine to say about matters of race and ecology, a rare feat in modern blockbuster cinema.

Of course, these heartfelt performances from Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, and company, well-constructed shots, and keen sense of story development didn’t just happen on their own. That honor, rather, belongs to director Matt Reeves (Let Me In, Cloverfield, Felicity), who stepped in for departing director Rupert Wyatt. Under his watchful eye, the Apes franchise has risen to new heights and managed once again to make me feel foolish for doubting how good of a movie it would be. Recently, I was able to catch up with Reeves via telephone to talk about the film’s surprising stylistic influences, the film’s fifty shades of moral grayness, what he learned from past iterations of Planet of the Apes and much more.

Nerdist: Hi, Matt! How are you doing today?

Matt Reeves: Good, how are you?

N: I’m great! Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. I have to say I really, really enjoyed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. A really fantastic job all around.

MR: Thank you.

N: So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is that the core conceit is basically one of co-existence. To me, it almost evokes a Western of sorts.

MR: That’s exactly – I love that! That’s exactly what I wanted it to be.

N: What sort of stylistic influences were you going for there?

MR: Gosh, well, you know, not all the stylistic influences were from Westerns. I also wanted it to be sort of a collection of references. I wanted it to start off kind of like Apocalypse Now, go into the sort of tribal center of the apes, and sort of see them in this tribal way. Then I wanted it to be like the beginning of 2001, where instead of the dawn of man it was the dawn of intelligent apes. Then the idea was that once you got connected to Caesar and the apes, and then you suddenly found out that there were humans, the idea that that put forward was the question of violence lived under every scene.

Unforgiven is one of my favorite movies, and I love John Ford movies, and the idea of there being two tribes, both vying for co-existence on land was absolutely – and then the idea of shooting up there, Vancouver, with the riding the horses in the water and all of that – all of that imagery was deliberate, and I thought it was a cool way to tell a story of two families. It just so happens that one of the families was an ape family and the other was a post-apocalyptic human family, but that it was actually quite an intimate story, and like you say, like a classic Western.

N: Exactly. And I’ve got to say, the action set pieces were fantastic, but what really drove the film for me, and the heart of the film, are those interactions between human and ape, and then you see these families, and you see them trying to suss out the best course of action. It had a – the morality of the film, it’s all shades of gray. I was very impressed in how you toed that line.

MR: That’s cool. Thank you. That was definitely an idea. The idea was not to have any overt villains, but to have every character kind of arrived at their point of view through their life experience and their point of view, that they knew or didn’t know, so that you could have empathy for everyone. You felt that you agreed with everything that everyone did, but you could feel where these things were coming from, so it didn’t feel like they were easy choices.

I thought, for me, the idea of this world of grays was that in Rise [of the Planet of the Apes], it’s kind of a very propulsive prison movie. He’s unjustly in prison, and you’re kind of waiting for the humans to get there, and there’s no ambiguity. At that point, you really want – and it’s incredibly effective, when there’s that confrontation on the Golden Gate Bridge, there’s no question – you want the apes to win.

The idea here was to take a revolutionary, where there was not the same kind of ambiguity, and have him sort of now be the patriarch in a larger civilization. It was essentially his family. He’s almost a Don Corleone of apes.

N: [laughs] That’s great.

MR: You have him have to lead in difficult times. Have him be this sort of mythic character for the apes, and have him be the right ape at the right time to lead in the most difficult of situations. It’s the kind of thing where the idea would have been that they could have continued in this existence and have their civilization just sort of blossom, if ti weren’t for the fact that there were humans, and then this question of co-existence would then not only create tension between the apes and the surviving humans, but it would also reveal the fault lines that exist in the ape world.

Because the background that the different apes have had is not the same as Caesar’s. He has–his father was virtually human, you know. Will was his surrogate father, and to hear Andy [Serkis] tell it, the way that he played it in Rise, he actually felt he was human, and then only realized later in the story, when he was being taken away from his human family, that he’s an ape. He suddenly realized that he’s an outsider. Then when he’s thrown in with the apes, he didn’t connect with anyone, and he has to sort of galvanize the apes and find it in himself to rise up. He’s really the ultimate outsider, but it’s the reason why he is the one in the film with the most complex point of view, and the one who understands how much there is to lose on both sides, and what the stakes are.

The key to the whole thing is that he’s a father, on top of everything else. That’s what we tried to do with Jason Clarke’s character too, was to make – in a way, when you look at the characters who are the most kind of impulsive and ready to fight if need be, it’s actually the characters who don’t have families. Dreyfus, who Gary Oldman plays, has lost his family, so of course there’s going to be a hair-trigger there, and he’s actually very measured and reasonable. He’s not really a villain. He doesn’t attack the apes, but he’s ready to, and you can understand why. But he also is ready to go to extremes if need be, because he’s really lost everything. Malcolm still has bits of his family – he has his son, and he has this relationship with Keri Russell. So the idea is he knows what they’ve lost, and wants the bleeding to stop. Caesar is very aware of what he can lose on his side. That’s kind of one of the guiding structural principles that we tried to tell that story through.

N: Yeah, and I think it was very effective, because you see that everyone has the capacity for evil within them, or the capacity to give into these more violent, base desires. As you mentioned, family and hope are the two things that seem to be keeping people afloat from giving into their more – I don’t want to say ‘animal’ desires, but more violent urges that they have.

MR: Yeah. The big question of the movie is can they resist violence? I thought that the real opportunity of this movie was to do – when I first came in, the outline that the studio was planning to realize was a very different story. It started in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, and the apes came down into it and they were very articulate, and actually it wasn’t even Caesar’s story. He was in important character in it, but it wasn’t told like this one, through his point-of-view.

I really wanted to make it the ape’s point-of-view and tell this story really about these two families. For me, it’s the question of their nature, and for them to be – I thought this was the movie where it could be – the thing is, you know the ending of the story. It’s Planet of the Apes.

N: Right, exactly.

MR: This is not a world of co-existence. The humans are cattle, and the idea was that this was the moment in the franchise, we could tell that moment where it could have been different. That meant tapping into that hope and seeing those little moments of connection, like when Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Karin, who plays Maurice, the orangutan, they have that kind of connection where they’re reading together. Little intimate details, that sort of say, “Wow, it could have been this. This is the way it could have been.” To let that sort of be living against this sort of building snowball of dread.

N: And that makes what ultimately happens all the more heartbreaking, because you see these moments. You mentioned the scene where they’re reading together, or even just how Malcolm bonds with Caesar. You see that they can see eye-to-eye, but too many things have happened, and they can’t go back again.

MR: Yeah. In a way, the movie’s kind of an epic tragedy too, on many levels. There’s a brotherhood of apes that’s shattered, and there was the chance at peace. The human and ape characters were striving side-by-side, and actually, were incredibly close to achieving it, and they just missed. And so that, hopefully, has some poignancy.

N: I definitely think so. You came into this, obviously Rupert Wyatt directed the last one – were there any lessons or things that you took to heart from the last film going into this?

MR: You know, I was just so – I have been a lifelong Planet of the Apes fan, and as a kid I always wanted to be an ape. I loved John Chambers’ make-up, and I wanted to get – I wished I could have a mask where I could move the mouth and articulate the mouth the way Roddy McDowall’s did. I could never get that. I just wanted to be an ape, I loved it. I have the dolls and all that stuff.

When I saw Rise, I was so impressed, on a number of levels. Part of the movie was almost like a silent movie. The stuff inside the habitat I thought was absolutely riveting! There was virtually no dialogue, except for that, what I thought was amazing sign language between Caesar and Maurice, the orangutan, before the orangutan had even been given the ALZ-113, and then really, primarily, the thing that blew me away was the fact that you had that level of emotion, like identification, with an ape. I’ve never had that kind of identification in a movie with a CG character, and I thought, “Wait a minute – what’s going on here?”

Andy Serkis, I thought, gives such a powerful performance, and the way that WETA was able to realize that, and the way that Rupert directed the movie, I thought it was incredibly engaging. I thought that that was reason enough to do this franchise again, which was not to redo it, but to kind of enter into the universe of it and tell it from this perspective. This is basically like a whole new point-of-view on these stories, and seeing a story that you never have quite seen, but somehow it still fits into the gestalt of the whole ape universe, and that is really cool.

So what I took away from that was, and what I pitched to the studio when they brought me in, was I said, “Don’t forget what you guys did, which was you made a movie that was all about Caesar, and you made a movie about the emotional lives of apes. That’s what this should be.” They said, to my great happiness, “Yes, OK, great. You can do that.” That’s how we came up with the idea of doing this mythic ape and human Western. It’s basically two different tribes. One tribe is human, one tribe is apes.

N: I’m glad that they saw things your way as well. I have to say, the marketing was almost misleading. I was thinking of it to be more of a straightforward summertime action movie.

MR: Sure, of course.

N:It’s impressive the amount of heart you’re able to pack in there. You have to have that marketing to get your average viewer in there, but I think it’s going to be a really pleasant surprise for a lot of people when they realize there’s more of an emotional core.

MR: Well, that’s great. Thank you. I hope so. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re selling Planet of the Apes. As a kid, the sight of a gorilla on horseback with a machine gun was terrifying and captivating. It’s such a provocative image, and it goes right – somehow, it has some tremendous resonance, just the image alone. So of course, they’re selling that imagery, and I do really hope, just as it was with Rise, when you get into the theater and you start connecting with the apes – in a way, it’s harder, I think, in a short form to sell that emotion, like in a trailer. I don’t even know how you would do it.

It’s part of the experience of watching the movie, taking its time with the apes, and in a way you might not be able to convey that. So it’s, you know, probably a little bit misleading, and it’s probably that they couldn’t necessarily convey that idea as powerfully as you would hopefully from watching the movie, and it certainly comes from the fact that they think that will get more people in the seats. But I’m hoping that we’ll satisfy people who are coming to see that, as well. It’ll be like, OK, we do have that spectacle, but actually, the movie has a lot of emotion, and that was definitely our intention.

N: You get the spectacle, but you also get the joy of discovery.

MR: That’s great!

N: Are there any Apes-lore Easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers out there?

MR: You know, we didn’t really do it in that way. I would say, they weren’t really Easter eggs, as much as they were overt things. Like we were referring to – the clearest thing is that we wanted to have apes on horseback. I thought, for me, one of the things that if you had was parity in numbers between apes and humans, the apes would completely have the advantage, because they’re seven times stronger than we are. They don’t need to live the way that we do. We’re much softer than they are. And that the balance would be – the only thing that would keep us from being annihilated would be firearms.

So the idea is that the gun had to become like the bone in 2001 – it’s the technological advance that gives the apes the advantage to dominate the earth, so that was a big part of the idea, was how do we get apes with guns on horseback? So that’s part of the story. The idea referring to the canon, the law giver, sort of ideas like the ape shall not kill ape, we have kind of the genesis of some of that, and the idea that the orangutans are the law givers, and Maurice is kind of teaching the children.

There are lots of details along that way, but I wouldn’t describe them as really hidden. They’re actually parts of the story, and they do absolutely clearly refer to the other movies. But hopefully in a way that makes you accept that it’s part of this movie. You know what I mean? It’s pleasurable for somebody who knows those movies, but then for people who don’t know those movies, it just functions in this context. So I wouldn’t say we tried to hide them.

Also, one thing that is kind of cool, I think, which I don’t know if people pick up on – they probably don’t – is that when we’re trying to come up with the ways in which language would express itself, we were trying to draw on parallels to our own kind of tribal development, but then also make it uniquely ape-y, and so borrow from the fact that Maurice knew American Sign Language, and have that be one of the elements, and then writing would be part of it.

But we also wanted to use pictograms, because we figured there would be a kind of visual sort of record of the history of the apes. So if you actually look on the wall, there’s actually a visual history of Rise, and you see in a kind of primitive fashion, the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the kind of pictograms on the wall. Little things like that, but again, it’s not like – I know that Rise did true homages. They had characters saying certain key lines from the series. We don’t really do things like that.

N: Obviously, I’m very excited about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and I’m sure the last thing you want to do is think about what’s coming down the pipeline, but what’s coming down the pipeline for you? Is there anything else you have that we can get excited about now?

MR: [chuckles] Well, I mean, I’m supposed to do the next film – the next Apes film, so …

N: Oh, awesome!

MR: One of the exciting things about doing this film – somebody asked me was it boring, or is it boring, that you know the end of the story, because the ’68 film exists – it becomes Planet of the Apes. I said that that was actually the best part, because the story ceased being about what happens, and instead about how that happens and why that happens, which is all a kind of generational story about Caesar and his kingdom of apes and how it sort of develops and evolves and becomes that movie.

That, to me, is like chapter one of a very long, epic novel. I feel like one of the cool things about throwing our lot in so strongly with the apes is that we were able to sort of develop and unearth so many interesting ape characters, and I think the idea of Caesar and his children and future Caesars, and how I think we can continue telling kind of hopefully vaguely Shakespearean mythic ape stories that lead to The Planet of the Apes.

—

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes swings into theaters on Friday, July 11, 2014. Be sure to check out the entire history of the Planet of the Apes franchise in Witney’s retrospective series “Great Apes” too.

Will you be seeing the film? What was your favorite part of the last one? Let us know in the comments below.

]]>http://nerdist.com/interview-director-matt-reeves-talks-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/feed/2The Alamo Drafthouse DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Live Stream Q&Ahttp://nerdist.com/the-alamo-drafthouse-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-live-stream-qa/
http://nerdist.com/the-alamo-drafthouse-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-live-stream-qa/#commentsSun, 29 Jun 2014 21:45:13 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=162567Do you have a ton of burning questions about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes? What if you knew the stars and director were going to be on stage, talking about the film and maybe even putting out the flame on some of said burning questions?

The Alamo Drafthouse is having an early screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes today at the Alamo Drathouse, followed by a live stream Q&A with director Matt Reeves and stars Gary Oldman and Andy Serkis. Tweet your questions and hashtag them #AskApes and maybe they’ll be read live!

We’ll be following along and taking notes as Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci moderates the discussion, but you can watch the whole thing below. Cautions: spoilers below!

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes will be in theaters July 11.

– “The idea was to present this as a world with no easy answers,” Reeves says early in the Q&A about the morality of the film. He discussed Dawn as a movie with no easy heroes and villains. “The idea was to not objectify or vilify anyone.”

– Reeves says that when he was brought onto the project, it was an originally apocalyptic story where Cesar was a straight-up hero. He pitched a rethink that was about the origins of the apes civilization out of the ruins of the largely decimated human world.

– “This story could be about the one moment where it could have been the planet of the humans of the apes. So the whole thing is about why that didn’t happen,” according to Reeves.

– For Reeves, it’s like an old-school Western where the core question is about coexistence.

– Oldman: when he closed the last page of the script, he was moved and surprised with his character, Dreyfus’ journey. “He’s a smart guy, I’d like to think a student of history, and he doesn’t just close off that argument [with Cesar].”

– Reeves and Oldman talked a lot about the film being about family and tragedy at the heart of a family (Dreyfus losing his, Cesar protecting his).

– Serkis says that he reacted strongly against another draft of the story that saw Cesar embracing a warlike nature (“screaming out at the end”). He embraced the current iteration where Cesar has to reject the mindset of his right-hand Koba and learning to express himself with language.

– There’s about 2,000 apes in Cesar’s community 10 years after the plague (although Serkis says there were only 15 mocap performers). They communicate largely through an “ape-ified” version of American Sign Language developed by Terry Notary (who plays multiple apes, including Rocket).

– The “rules” of the ape language were developed at the script stage, with Reeves saying he was in part inspired by his son’s discovery of language. Cesar speaks maybe four words throughout the entire film. It was a “long process of exploration,” he says, largely dealing with the use of contractions, how the subtitles for sign language would be used, and how the ape characters could speak and win.

– Reeves complimented Notary’s ability to provide many different styles of performance for multiple apes (both background and featured) – somewhere north of 20 characters in all.

– For Reeves, the move towards vocalization and language for the apes was one of the most important journeys for the film.

– Reeves talks about being raised on the classic Apes films and wishing that he could do a version of those with the rubber masks.

– Oldman on not getting to do performance capture in Dawn: “Did I have performance capture envy? Maybe.”

– Reeves on the challenges of the Dawn shoot: Rise was largely shot on stages (approximately 75%). Because he wanted something a little more robust and real, he went to FX house WETA and asked for help in coming up with equipment to be used out in the elements. He wanted the apes to look more realistic and felt that the path to doing that was dropping them into real environments.

– Reeves says he wasn’t concerned with trying to come up with twist for this movie – we already know that this world will ultimately end up like the world in Apes ’68. He says that the series’ journey is the twist, explaining how our world becomes theirs.

]]>http://nerdist.com/the-alamo-drafthouse-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-live-stream-qa/feed/1New DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES TV Spot Sets Up the Ape Menacehttp://nerdist.com/new-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-tv-spot-sets-up-the-ape-menace/
http://nerdist.com/new-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-tv-spot-sets-up-the-ape-menace/#commentsWed, 28 May 2014 22:15:38 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=152497I’m calling shenanigans: apes do require heat, despite what one of the speakers in this new Dawn of the Planet of the Apes TV spot says. Beyond that, it’s shaping up to be one of the more intense entries in the summer 2014 lineup.

It’s interesting seeing how Fox is framing Dawn of the Planet of the Apes across media. Based on the latest TV spot, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Caesar and his band of mentally-enhanced apes – now living in the redwoods outside of San Francisco following a devastating plague – are the villains of the piece.

Contrast that with the new trailer playing in theaters before X-Men: Days of Future Past – allowing us to see one human being welcomed by Cesar’s army, and you’ve got a wholly different picture of the film, framing the humans as the aggressors and the apes as the close-knit tribe pushed too far.

From what I’m hearing, it’s somewhere in between, as Cesar (Andy Serkis) attempts to lead his ape army to peaceful coexistence, while human survivors – led by Gary Oldman’s grieving character Dreyfus – want a little get-back for the plague that decimated much of humanity ten years earlier.

Serkis and Oldman are joined by Judy Greer, Kerri Russell, and Jason Clarke, the guy who just wants everyone to get along. Let Me In director and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory writer (!) Matt Reeves is sitting in the director’s chair for this one, and has been tapped to direct the next film in the series.

]]>http://nerdist.com/new-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-tv-spot-sets-up-the-ape-menace/feed/1We Saw New Footage From DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES… and It’s Awesomehttp://nerdist.com/we-saw-new-footage-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-and-its-awesome/
http://nerdist.com/we-saw-new-footage-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-and-its-awesome/#commentsMon, 21 Apr 2014 16:00:14 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=134606Last week Nerdist attended an early look at some of the footage from the upcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and on hand to present the footage was none other than Caesar himself, Mr. Andy Serkis, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite people. Serkis was charming, funny and informative, providing context for the clips we were about to see. I’ve been excited for Dawn for a while now, and, probably like most, consider Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be one of the biggest surprises to come out of the summer movie season in 2011. Before I go into specifics, my overall impression of the footage was, “WOW, this looks fantastic!,” both in terms of technology and story. I think it’s safe to say that fans of both the original series and the more recent Rise will not be disappointed with the continuation of the franchise.

WHERE WE ARE

As Serkis set up the film, we find ourselves ten years after the events of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. As far as Caesar and his group know, humans have become extinct. The apes are living in a peaceful and functioning community. Caesar is their leader and he now has a son. Things go awry when a pocket of survivors (Keri Russell, Jason Clarke) come across a few apes in the woods.

WHAT WE SAW

The first clip shown was not an actual scene from the film but a side-by-side comparison of the raw footage of the actors playing the apes in their mo-cap gear and the rendered footage of the finished product. I can’t explain how cool it was to see. It would appear that the technology has grown leaps and bounds from the film that was released just three years ago. Every twitch, every human movement, was captured perfectly through the mo-cap technology. The other thing of note that Serkis pointed out was that very little of the film was shot on stages and green screens. The production took the actors playing the apes on location, which I think adds to how believable everything appeared. Other actors of high caliber were cast as the other main ape characters, and Serkis, while the master, appears to be in very good company.

The next big question was, of course, how much would the apes talk? In Rise, Caesar says his first handful of words before the conclusion of the films. Now that it’s ten years later in the timeline, how much would the animals speak? One scene demonstrated that the apes were using different forms of language to communicate. Some of them signed, some of them made sounds that Caesar recognized as language, and Caesar spoke in fragments in English. This was a decision discussed by director Matt Reeves and Serkis this weekend at WonderCon: They said that since the apes had only been on their current evolution for ten years, it wouldn’t make much sense to have them speaking fluent English yet.

Finally, the humans: Gary Oldman has joined the cast of Dawn alongside Keri Russell and Jason Clarke. When Serkis presented the footage to us, he mentioned that Oldman’s character wasn’t necessarily “a bad guy” and that the themes of tribalism and family come into play in a big way in this film. While we didn’t see Oldman being as dangerous as he is portrayed in the trailer, what we did see were the humans shown as desperate, scared and, at times, aggressive. However, based on the footage we saw, the apes could be described in the same way…

CONCLUSION

When I left the presentation, I was so excited to watch the completed movie. This is something that was obviously treated with great care by all of the parties involved. The apes are being portrayed as complex and intelligent and the humans are in an impossible situation. Like any good genre film, Dawn promises to be a story about a lot more than just apes riding horses and wearing war paint. But that’s still pretty freaking sweet, too.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens in theaters July 11, 2014. For more from Serkis discussing his role as Caesar and all kinds of great things from WonderCon this weekend, see the Nerdist News video exclusives.

]]>http://nerdist.com/we-saw-new-footage-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-and-its-awesome/feed/1Rumor: Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch BOTH In STAR WARS: EPISODE VII?http://nerdist.com/rumor-gary-oldman-and-benedict-cumberbatch-both-in-star-wars-episode-vii/
http://nerdist.com/rumor-gary-oldman-and-benedict-cumberbatch-both-in-star-wars-episode-vii/#commentsTue, 25 Feb 2014 16:00:49 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=117454Another day, another Star Wars: Episode VII casting rumor (it’s gonna be like this for the next couple months, kids, get used to it). This one comes from MarketSaw, a site you might have heard of before, if only because they were the first to ever report that Lucasfilm was actively working on a sequel trilogy way back in 2009, three years before any official announcement. According to their sources, the casting breakdown right now goes something like this:

“Ian McDiarmid, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher,, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Warwick Davis, Benedict Cumberbatch and Gary Oldman. I believe Cumberbatch and Oldman were pursued for the same role, but I don’t know how that will work out with the script changes, but I’m told they are both involved.”

What, no Kenny Baker?? Ok, so the big bomb dropped here, if this rumor is true, is that BOTH Cumberbatch and Oldman are purportedly going to be in Episode VII. Why have one British actor play an evil Imperial officer when two are better? (I mean, that’s probably what they’re going to play, right?) If true, this means Cumberbatch will give Hugo Weaving a run for his money as the go-to actor across multiple nerd franchises (Weaving, of course, playing key parts in The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Transformers and the Marvel Cinematic Universe). If Cumberbatch lands this gig, he won’t be far behind Weaving, having starred in Star Trek Into Darkness, The Hobbit, and now, possibly, Star Wars. If he just shows up in either the Marvel or DC movie universes, then Cumberbatch and Weaving are tied. If Gary Oldman is also in this, that would make Episode VII a reunion, as both he and Cumberbatch both starred together in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Also in that batch of casting rumors is the suggestion that Ian McDiarmid will indeed be back as Emperor Palpatine. He’s the key villain of the entire saga, so this makes sense. Mr. McDiarmid is the very best thing about both Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith, so the more of him, the better. The other cast we all know about (well, unofficially anyway), except this is the first I’ve ever head that Warwick Davis is back. While he could be playing another role, could Wicket the Ewok actually come back? Did the Rebels pull an Angelina Jolie and adopt a native child from Endor? Although the idea of an older, wiser Wicket as gunner on the Millennium Falcon or something is kind of adorable.

Is even Wicket the Ewok coming back??

In terms of story details, this is what the original report had to say:

“Ultimately it’s about twins, and which will take a path towards darkness and which will follow in their fathers footsteps, or at least that is what it used to be, that may come later as I think changes are being undertaken to bring the original cast into the forefront of the story, leading to ramifications that lead up to the next generation of Skywalkers.”

So unlike the Expanded Universe, where the Jedi twins were Han and Leia’s kids, this suggests that Luke will have twin children to carry on the Skywalker name. Does this mean that Han and Leia didn’t get married or have children? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

And finally, also in the report was this tidbit about the future of the Indiana Jones saga:

“Regarding Harrison Ford, two more Indiana Jones features are in the negotiation stages as per Ford’s contract clause on Star Wars”

Really?? While I could see Harrison playing an elder, General Solo in charge of the Alliance Fleet or something, I’m really having a hard time picturing seventy-something Harrison Ford rummaging through the ruins, especially after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If Disney is smart, they’ll reboot Indiana Jones and show us the unseen adventures of Indy back in his World War II heyday (just please don’t remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ever.)

Never. Forget.

With shooting scheduled to being in just a couple of months, we hope we’ll be getting real confirmations here pretty soon.

]]>http://nerdist.com/rumor-gary-oldman-and-benedict-cumberbatch-both-in-star-wars-episode-vii/feed/15Odd City Releases Limited Edition TRUE ROMANCE Printhttp://nerdist.com/odd-city-releases-limited-edition-true-romance-print/
http://nerdist.com/odd-city-releases-limited-edition-true-romance-print/#commentsThu, 06 Feb 2014 17:30:01 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=112053It’s hard to believe it’s been just over twenty years since True Romance was released. Arguably one of both Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott’s best films, True Romance is a pulpy action romance that has become a “cult” classic in every sense of the word. To celebrate the film, Odd City has recruited cinephile and artist Matt Ryan Tobin to create a limited edition print that sums up the visceral spirit of the movie.

Odd City releases limited edition, often film-inspired prints from artists, illustrators, and designers all over the world. The Austin-based company said of the piece, “Matt Ryan Tobin’s print is a testament to the philosophy of Clarence Worley, and words we here at Odd City, try to live by: Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse!”

Tobin himself is a True Romance fan: “This movie is so vivid and colorful in its writing, characters and film style. I really wanted to give my all in complimenting the film, by approaching the artwork in the same way.” Mission accomplished, Tobin.

The 36″x24″ limited edition True Romance print is available in regular and variant styles, and will go on sale at the Odd City Entertainment store on Friday, February 7th.

]]>http://nerdist.com/odd-city-releases-limited-edition-true-romance-print/feed/0First Images from DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APEShttp://nerdist.com/first-images-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/
http://nerdist.com/first-images-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/#commentsSat, 25 Jan 2014 19:00:09 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=108353No one expected Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be any good, and we certainly didn’t think it would be great. Its follow-up, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, has considerably more to live up to.

Dawn has several things working in its favor. First, anything Andy Serkis touches with his magical motion capture body turns to gold (or at least it should). Second, it’s got a killer cast, most notably one of the most underrated actors ever (still??), Gary Oldman. Third, it’s already bumped up its marketing game with some seriously cool interactive graphics.

The film’s new website explains, through a series of images, what’s transpired in the years since Rise. Check out some of the first photos and posters from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to see what’s in store for our primate protagonists (‘cause we all know we’re the bad guys here, right?).

]]>http://nerdist.com/first-images-from-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/feed/1New Trailer For DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APEShttp://nerdist.com/new-trailer-for-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/
http://nerdist.com/new-trailer-for-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/#commentsWed, 18 Dec 2013 15:30:01 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=102294Okay, back to the Planet of the Apes once again:

Yes, it’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, following up on 2011’s Rise of reboot, and the peace between the apes and the human survivors breaks down. Andy Serkis is back as Caesar, Gary Oldman is the lead human, and the official description is:

A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth’s dominant species.

So, that. Did you like the first reboot enough to go with this one? Does the trailer look menacing enough? Comments below or DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL….

Alex Murphy is dead. Long live the new Alex Murphy. Joel Kinnaman is stepping into the silver suit… er black cyborg body of the future of law enforcement. Sam Jackson, Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton rebuild Detroit cop, husband, and father Alex Murphy into the cop of the future as the leaders of OCP. Abbie Cornish will be adding an element not seen as much in the original film, playing Alex’s dedicated wife, who wants to see her husband, not a machine.

If fans are open to it, Robocop looks like it could be the same kind of fun conversation starter the original film was in 1987. That film highlighted over-the-top violence as an opportunity to discuss topics as varied as the disparity between the rich and poor in a dying city to the oversaturation of media in our daily lives. (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) The new release could easily open up conversations like what drone warfare in an urban environment means to ordinary citizens. Could corporate authority lead to an America controlled by privateers and mercenaries? And lastly, what really did happen when Robocop, a Cylon and KIT walked into a bar?

While we’re always prone to be distrustful of a remake of a beloved property, based on this trailer, we’ll be front and center when the new Robocop reaches theaters in February 2014.